Autodesk does not support the use of either AutoCAD or AutoCAD LT on Apple computers. For more information, and for system requirements for industry specific versions, visit the Autodesk website.ReadMore...

A PDF file is created via a PDF printer which works like an ordinary printer or plotter, the only difference being that the drawing is not sent to a printer to obtain a hard copy of the drawing, but is instead 'printed' to a PDF file. The PDF file can then easily be distributed via e-mail to be plotted to hardcopy elsewhere.

This file can be opened in Adobe software (or similiar free software) from where it can be produced as a hard copy print as required.

After installation, the PDF printer will show up in the AutoCAD Printer/Plotter selection. Just select the PDF printer in the Plot Dialog Box and a prompt will appear requesting a location to save the PDF file to.

If a more feature rich PDF is required, and funds are available, there are a few options. Among them are:

bluebeam This software enables the creation of markup drawings within AutoCAD.

As of Feb 2008 DWGGateway does not work with AutoCAD 2008, but it is of no real need in AutoCAD 2008.

CADwizz has a converter that can open any AutoCAD release DWG or DXF file from version 2.5 to version 2008, and convert it to any other AutoCAD release drawing file from version 2.5 to version 2007. It can also plot to printer or PDF :

We make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the contents of this website. The information contained in this website is strictly for educational purposes. Therefore, if you wish to apply ideas contained in this website, you are taking full responsibility for your actions.

We make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, fitness, or completeness of the contents of this website. The information contained in this website is strictly for educational purposes. Therefore, if you wish to apply ideas contained in this website, you are taking full responsibility for your actions.

Neverwinter Nights 2 for Mac (ESRB: Teen) is a game with interesting and in-depth story line, and dynamic characters and interaction. Anyone who likes role-playing games should love this game.

Sure to please everyone, this Macintosh game lets you design the character you like - good or evil, chaotic or lawful - as well as to role-play the way you want, and choose your alignment, allies, companions, and how you want your character to develop.

There is a pool of 12 non-player characters who can join the player’s party. In addition, the player can gain or lose influence with party members, which dictates outcomes to certain quests or causes strife in the party. Gameplay is not a continuation of the original Neverwinter Nights campaign, but makes references to the “Wailing Death” plague and the war with the rival city of Luskan from the original NWN.

Neverwinter Nights 2 is set in the fantasy world of the Forgotten Realms, one of the popular campaign settings of Dungeons and Dragons. The game centers around a powerful force of evil named the “King of Shadows” and an artifact that can ultimately defeat this arch-enemy. The game itself is divided into three Acts.

Throughout Act I, the Player’s Character witnesses and later endures an attack by a deadly warlock who is responsible for the Blacklake murders. The PC is initially led to believe that the warlock’s identity is the King of Shadows.

Act II is more role-play oriented than Act I, whereas a Luskan ambassador to Neverwinter, Torio Claven, frames the Player’s Character for the massacre of a Luskan town. The Player’s Character becomes a squire of a Neverwinter knight to protect him/her from the draconian Luskan justice system and must gather evidence to prove their innocence in several locales. Act II concludes with the search for a hidden stronghold, the magical Haven of Shandra’s ancestor Ammon Jerro where answers could be found regarding the silver shards, and Ammon’s subsequent surrender.

The main antagonists of Act III are the Shadow Reavers, powerful undead mages that include a revived Garius, intent on allowing the King of Shadows to reemerge. The player must prepare Crossroad Keep for imminent battle by fortifying its troops, lands and by finding allies from other lands. Once Garius is defeated, the surviving non-player character’s on a Good-aligned player character’s side must battle the King of Shadows and his avatars. Evil characters may choose to side with the King of Shadows and, as a result, must defeat every remaining non-player character party member to complete the game. The game ends once you either kill the king of shadows or your remaining companions.

As with the original Neverwinter Nights, the Mac version does not include the toolkit for users to create their own adventure “modules.” This toolset, called Electron, is included with the Windows version of the game. The Mac version can use player-created modules, however. Neverwinter Nights 2 is available through Aspyr’s web site, for $49.99.

Microsoft will be holding a press event in Japan on Tuesday to reveal their upcoming RPG’s. All of this will be taking place at the “Xbox 360 RPG Premiere 2008”. Two games are already confirmed to be at the event, but it’s rumored that Microsoft will be announcing brand new RPG’s that are either exclusive to the 360, or games previously thought to be exclusive to other consoles.

The two games confirmed so far are Square Enix’s The Last Remnant and Infinite Undiscovery. It has been touted that Mistwalker, the company behind the Xbox 360 exclusives Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, will finally reveal Cry, which as of late has dropped off the radar, or one of the sequels to Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey.

It is also heavily rumored that there will be a few other surprises showcased at this event. What they could be are anyone’s guess, but with Square Enix showcasing two RPG’s already, the possibility that the all powerful Final Fantasy Series may be making its proper Xbox 360 debut? Only time will tell, but make sure you come back to TheGameReviews.com tomorrow, as we will have all the news from this event right here.

Aerosmith fans can finally get their chance to step into the shoes of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry as video game developer Activision Inc (ATVI.O) released its Guitar Hero: Aerosmith game on Friday.

Dozens flocked to the Hard Rock restaurant in Times Square to see the legendary five-member rock band debut the game and try out the latest Guitar Hero addition.

Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford even brought his sons to take a look at the band's creation.

The game features 30 of the band's most notable hits such as "Love in an Elevator" and "Sweet Emotion." It also includes songs from various artists Aerosmith performed and collaborated with over the years, including Run D.M.C.'s "Walk This Way" and "I Hate Myself for Loving You" by Joan Jett.

There is even a special guitar controller emblazoned with the band's red-and-white logo for hard core fans.

The game and guitar controller bundle for Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Xbox 360, Sony Corp's (6758.T) PlayStation3 and Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS) Wii sells for $99.99, with an additional PlayStation2 version for $89.99. The game is also sold individually for each of the consoles and costs $59.99 and $49.99, respectively.

The Aerosmith game is the first Guitar Hero edition that focuses on an individual rock band. The previous three versions of the game featured various rock music genres that ranged from grunge, classic rock, metal, punk and '80s hits.

"This is an experiment for us," said Charles Huang, co-founder of Activision's RedOctane unit, which oversees the Guitar Hero franchise. "There are certain artists that have so much great music like Aerosmith, Metallica and Van Halen ... but we wanted to do something much bigger."

The Santa Monica, California-based company said Aerosmith's vast collection of rock hits and elite status in the music industry made the band the ideal choice for the new game.

"There's only a handful of bands that have that longevity," Huang said.

During the game's creation, band members spent two weeks performing in a motion capture studio in order for their video game figures to move exactly as the group performs on stage.

Activision is set to come out with a Metallica Guitar Hero edition in 2009, but declined to specify what month the game will be released.

The company will also release Guitar Hero: World Tour during the Christmas season, which will include a drum set and microphone in addition to the guitar controller. This version will rival Activision's biggest competitor "Rock Band," produced by Viacom Inc's MTV unit (VIAb.N) and Electronic Arts Inc

All the conspiracy theories can be put aside now because it’s here: Diablo III has been officially announced.

The splash screen from Blizzard’s site has made everyone go berserk and until today everything seemed possible, even a merger between the Diablo and the Warcraft universes.

The Blizzard Invitational was to be the perfect opportunity for a Diablo III announcement as it fitted right in the timeframe, with Diablo 2 launched on June 29, 2000 and the Lord of Destruction Expansion on June 29, 2001. True, it’s a day early, but nevertheless we will be seeing Diablo III. The game looks quite good although it wasn’t as mind-blowing as I would have expected. It seems to run on the same engine as Starcraft II (especially in terms of fire effects and splash damage) and the interface remains largely the same with mana and health spheres and the same kind of gameplay we were used to. One addition I find more than interesting consists of the red orbs some enemies will leave behind; these will restore your health without you having to resort to potions.

Diablo III still uses an isometric perspective, despite several rumors, but the engine is completely 3D at first glance and supports full physics (some curtains moved when an axe went past them). For the first time ever, players can even use part of the environment against their targets, by collapsing walls and doing other mischievous actions. In the gameplay demo, Blizzard introduced a brand new class, called the Witch Doctor, to show off the cooperative features. This character has power over minds, can summon pets and control disease and it makes for one hell of a sidekick for the barbarian.

Perhaps some will be disappointed that Blizzard hasn’t been more innovative and pushed the Diablo games into a new direction, possibly a 3D perspective like Hellgate London, but I for one am sure they made the perfect choice. It has all the chances to become even more addictive than Diablo II and, if they don’t delay the launch for too long, I’m sure it will be an amazing success. You should check out the trailers below for more goodies. Have Fun!

“Piracy is BAD” proclaims every copyright dependent industry lobby group. “Downloading is stealing” is another popular one. How about “downloads are a lost sale”? Ubisoft clearly didn’t believe that last one, as they distributed a no-cd patch from the scene group RELOADED as a fix for one of their games.

Piracy can be a funny business at times, but the rhetoric is often extremely predictable. So when something unexpected happens it can knock you off your stride. Something like… a major game publisher distributing a Scene no-cd crack as a fix would do it, for instance. If it sounds unlikely, that’s because sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. In this case, the publisher is Ubisoft, the game ‘Rainbow Six: Vegas 2‘, and the Scene ‘no-cd’ crack – yes that’s there as well.

The situation revolves around that oddest of characters, Direct2Drive (D2D) - an online games store, owned by IGN, selling games over the Internet as protected downloads. Game code is modified to prevent the standard retail DRM from inhibiting game play (as there is no actual disc to check for) with Trymedia activation utilized instead. More importantly, since the code around the DRM has been modified and changed to a different system, regular patches from the game developers can’t be used. Instead, patches must be reworked by D2D to accommodate these changes. These changes are not always quick, a point D2D does try and defuse in its FAQ.

Thus we come to Rainbow Six: Vegas2 (R6V2) which, since its release in March, has had three patches released for it. The third, 1.03 provides a lot of changes, including new play modes, so legitimate purchasers of the game were eager to try it. The problem is, those that bought it via D2D can’t use it. This is the problem inherent in DRM. Those that buy the product are the ones affected, not those the DRM is designed to defeat.

After lots of complaining and attempts to fix things themselves, one Ubisoft employee found a solution. A zip file was uploaded to the help/support site, named “R6Vegas2_fix.zip”.

If D2D users patched to 1.02, then replaced the EXE with this one, they could then update to the new patch. However, someone ran a hex edit and it appears the fix was not Ubisoft code but actually a ‘no-cd’ crack released by the Scene group RELOADED, as shown here.

Since then, the zip file containing the fix has been pulled from the Ubisoft support site, so we’re unable to verify. The game’s community is as baffled by this as everyone else. Since the claimed origin of the fix, 10 days ago, there has been no word on it officially from Ubisoft, beyond a ‘Community Manager’ who states

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.

_________________

Ubi.Vigil

Community Manager

Ubisoft UK

Although it is not unknown for a Scene release to be used to ‘fix’ a retail product, it’s certainly rare to have that fact promoted. That the ‘no-cd’ patch works, might have some relation to how brutal the Scene is when it comes to the quality of their work, especially in games. Whilst this is a validation that the Scene isn’t as bad as the lobby groups would have you believe (they fixed the game, and did it for free) you can bet that Ubisoft won’t be smiling at E3, and that they, and Direct2Drive, will continue to use DRM to annoy and inconvenience paying customers.

Introducing Games for Windows – LIVE, the free gaming service built for Windows that makes great Windows games even better. With Games for Windows – LIVE, you get an online identity – called a gamertag – and a friends list that works across multiple games, the XBOX 360, and even the Zune music service. You can easily find and communicate with your friends online with text and voice chat. Earn achievements and Gamerscore that lets you track and compare your accomplishments.

Play multiplayer games with your friends, or play against new opponents online using our exclusive TrueSkill™ matchmaking system – with other Windows® players or with or against XBOX 360 players (in supported games.)

All of this is possible today – and at no charge.

And it gets even better.

Every Games for Windows- LIVE game carries the Games for Windows branding, which means they meet standards for quality, consistency, safety, and ease of play. Games for Windows games are tested to support wide-screen monitors, 64-bit operating systems, parental controls, and, in appropriate games, the Xbox 360 Controller for Windows.

Games for Windows – LIVE lets you add achievements and gamerscore earned in Windows games to your XBOX LIVE account. You can also chat and message your friends on LIVE, regardless of the platform.

The stability and functionality of the Xbox LIVE service provides Games for Windows – LIVE players with a constant, feature-rich platform that already supports a community of over 12 million gamers. Come join the fun!

And - Games for Windows – LIVE will soon be the best place to download additional content for your favorite games, from game trailers to playable demos to new maps and levels. Extending your game experience will be easy with Games for Windows – LIVE.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is the first nex-gen title to be 100% developed internally by Lucas Arts. After

the saga was completed by the final movies, there were some questions about the story and specifically about the period of time between Episode III and IV. Darth Vader has just become the apprentice Darth Sidious and the next one picks up 20 years later.

The game will have as protagonist the secret apprentice of Darth Vader and he will feature amazing powers, many of which have never been seen before. It enjoys lots of new technologies like Digital Molecular Matter (from Pixelux Entertainment) and euphoria from NaturalMotion. The game is scheduled to be launched this fall, but its achievements as well as cheat codes have already surfaced the world wide web.

We know that true gamers play all these games just for fun, as they should, and not in order to achieve specific point landmarks to prove to their friends they are very cool, but we also know that sometimes you just can't live without achieving everything possible with a title you really enjoy. If that's the case and you want to know exactly what to look for when it comes to this game, we have prepared a full list of cheats for you. Good luck!

CHEATS

Select "Options" at the main menu, then the "Enter Code" option. Enter one of the following codes to activate the corresponding cheat function. Please note: remember to check back regularly, as we will update this list as soon as more codes are released (if any).

Copies of Grand Theft Auto IV have been pulled in Thailand after a teenager confessed to murdering a taxi driver.

The 18-year-old high school student is accused of stabbing the cab driver to death by trying to copy a scene from the game.

The biggest video game publisher in the south-east Asian country, New Era Interactive Media, has told retailers to stop selling GTA IV.

It is due to be replaced by another video game title.

Death penalty

Thai newspapers say the teenager, whose name has been withheld, was arrested while trying to steer a cab backwards out of a Bangkok street with the driver still in the back seat.

Police claim the 18-year-old confessed to stealing the taxi and said he killed the 54-year-old driver after he fought back. The teenager could face the death penalty if he is found guilty.

Bangkok police Captain Veerarit Pipatanasak said: "He wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game.

Ladda Thangsupachai, director of the ministry's Cultural Surveillance Centre, said: "This time-bomb has already exploded and the situation could get worse. Today it is a cab driver, but tomorrow it could be a video game shop owner."

Taking a step forward, Microsoft planned to not only improve in hardware rendering with the recently announced DirectX 11 API, but also expand the way software engineers could get their programs to work efficiently on modern computer hardware.

Upon reflection of the special feature by Kevin Gee of Microsoft (by way of Gamasutra's XNA portal), Microsoft plans to dive into the mechanics of multiple core and multithreaded computing by way of lower level hardware support.

Communicating with the computer hardware at the "down-level," DirectX 11 is expected to serve as the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) of the next Windows, just as DirectX 10 was to Windows Vista.

But unlike DX10, DX11 introduces a "no break" in-between the current generation API, in the same manner that DirectX10 introduced a discontinuity from DirectX 9. As announced before, DirectX 11 will be backward compatible with DirectX 10 hardware and supporting operating systems.

This would mean that Windows Vista and DirectX 10.1 hardware will be able to handle DirectX 11, though Gee confirms that the next generation application programming interface will release by the time the next Windows operating system ships to shelves as well.

In DX11, programmers will be able to streamline engineering of software for multi-core and multi-CPU computers. This is because Microsoft plans to not only implement rendering contexts (processing scheduling) and deferred contexts, but also asynchronous API calls.

This asynchronous system extends to communications and transactions between a multi-core CPU and a GPU, or a multi-core CPU and a multiple-GPU card, which either option would heed the instructions as listed by the primary immediate context and the added deferred contexts.

In addition to that, DX11 takes the idea of general purpose GPU processing and mixes in cross-hardware support. Regardless of graphics chip manufacturer, all modern GPUs with shader processors can be used for helping in processing applications.

But for graphics powerusers and game developers, perhaps the most interesting feature that DirectX 11 has planned for implementation is the inclusion of hardware tessellation. Microsoft's engineers introduced three hardware stages for the rendering pipeline that will allow high power GPUs to perform tessellation over hardware: the hull shader, the tessellator, and domain shader.

With DX11 also comes new texture compression methods BC6 and BC7. Microsoft boasts that these two compression formats are the best they can offer for the ratio of high-quality over performance.

DirectX 11 also introduces Shader Model 5 for High Level Shader Language (HLSL), providing a better way graphics programmers will be able to implement shader programs. It also adds double-precision support, which allows programmers to tackle shader specialization with polymorphism, objects, and interfaces.

The NPD Group released its first global list of best-selling games on Thursday with Grand Theft Auto IV taking the top spot.

According to worldwide data compiled from the top three video game bean-counters, NPD (United States), Chart-Track (UK), and Enterbrain (Japan), these are the best-selling games so far this year:

1. Grand Theft Auto IV (6,293,000 copies sold)

2. Super Smash Brothers Brawl (5,433,000)

3. Mario Kart Wii (4,697,000)

4. Wii Fit (3,604,000)

5. Guitar Hero III (3,475,000)

It should be noted that outside of GTA IV, Nintendo Wii accounted for the second, third, and fourth best-selling games, in addition to being the lead-selling system for Guitar Hero III which holds the fifth spot.

The "Top Global Markets Report" is based on software point of sale data from the three biggest video game markets in the world. It arrives as the often inaccurate estimate site, VG Chartz, has gained considerable attention over the last year for attempting to compile worldwide video game sales.

With Fall settling in, you can expect the usual bumper crop harvest of annual sports sims to come our way. One of these titles include Konami's Pro Evolution Soccer 2009, which has been confirmed to be released this October 17 on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and the PC.

As expected, the game will once again make use of a fully-licensed UEFA Champions League mode. In addition, the publishers have also signed up with several Premier League club - Liverpool and Manchester United - giving PES 2009 the distinction as the official video game of the England national team, with Wembley featured as one of the new playable grounds.

PES team leader Jon Murphy made comparisons with their biggest rival from EA, the FIFA franchise. He was quoted having said that "they still have a long way to go before they can match the intuitive and absorbing gameplay of Pro Evolution Soccer".

He also added that, aside from the newly licensed clubs, PES 2009 will have several other additions which should place it above similar games of its type. These include improved AI, new control methods, a graphical overhaul, and key online enhancements.

The cover of this year's game will feature FC Barcelona's Lionel Messi. Other releases of PES 2009 for the PS2 and PSP will follow shortly after the console and PC versions, while a Wii title will also be due out next Spring.

All the Star Wars fans that also own an Xbox 360 can congratulate themselves for a job well done. Be it through an organized effort or actions driven by their unconscious, they have managed to make the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed the most downloaded one on the console.

The demo has more than 1 million downloads on Xbox Live in less than eight days since launch, beating the previous record, held by Too Human from Silicon Knights, which needed nine days to reach the same number of downloads.

The PlayStation Network version of the game demo did not do too bad either. The two versions combined have more than 2.3 million downloads, which means that at least that many people are genuinely interested in what the game has to offer.

The Force Unleashed promises to put the players in the role of one Sith apprentice, whose lord is Darth Vader. The mission of the apprentice is to find and kill a variety of Jedi and Republic characters while developing ever greater Dark Side Force powers. There should be a twist in there somewhere, as the ending of the game seems to pit you against your Dark master.

The demo was pretty fun when I played it, with Imperial stormtroopers flying around and doors blown open via the awesome power of a Force push. The game looks good and handles well, although the camera is a bit unresponsive. The only big drawback for me was the final fight, which pits you against a chicken walker that needs to be taken out via quick time event.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed will be available in North America on September 16 for the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation Portable, the Nintendo Wii and the DS. Asia will have to wait one day to get the game while European players will be able to get it on September 19.

Less a manifesto, and more a notverymanlyfesto, as this is very much a tech-centric list. If you want thoughtful game theory, you’ve got the wrong nitpicker.

The PC is the best gaming platform in the world - but it could be better still.

While it’s great that the PC doesn’t have to suffer quite the same degree of standardisation as its locked-down console brethren, we have nevertheless fallen into certain patterns of how we game. There are things we take for granted and thus expect, like WASD controls in FPSes and patches for bad bugs. There are others still we should be able to take for granted, but can’t because the same damn-fool oversights happen again and again. Even outside of the more obvious annoyances like referring to Xbox controls or including ridiculously draconian DRM (which are both more a question of money than of thoughtlessness), a ton of stuff that any gamer could have told the developer was a glaring screw-up keeps on turning up in otherwise great games. Here are just 10 of the worst offenders, 10 things that every single modern PC game should get right and has no excuse not to. Please do suggest others in comments below.

1. Alt-tab support.

Perhaps the single greatest, but so often neglected, Must-have there is. Just having rudimentary task-switching support in there isn’t enough (hello-o Valve games) - it needs to be fairly quickly and smooth, and included in the original release of the game, not in a patch down the line. This should be as big a priority as graphics or sound. Don’t care if it’s a massive pain to code in. Don’t care if you have to re-start the entire game from scratch to put it in. Alt-tab is absolutely integral to the way we all use our PCs. Half of us essentially live at our computers - we need to be able to task-switch to an IM window or an inbox or even another game in moments, not be locked into one program. Frankly - if your game doesn’t alt-tab, it’s not really a PC game.

Possibly deserving an entry of its own, but in the name of keeping this list to 10 I’ll include it here - all PC games should be able to play in a window. I’ve missed social events because someone’s instant messaged me about going to the pub, but not bothered to phone or text when I don’t get back to them right away because I’m off in a game. One day, the girl of my dreams will magically message me, and by the time I’ve exited the game she’ll have got bored of waiting and declared her love for my arch-nemesis (I don’t actually have an arch-nemesis, but I’m working on it). Then I will hunt down and kill the developer of whichever unwindowable game I was playing at the time. They will appreciate why. Window play is also necessary for 2D games whose resolutions can’t be changed - 800×600 pixels of pretty hand-drawn art look like roadkill in toontown when they’re stretched over a 1680×1050 panel.

2. Use standardised install and savegame folders

Everything goes in Program Files by default, please (and, just as importantly, there needs to be an option to install anywhere the player would rather). Don’t have your game install itself into the root of C:\ or an obscure sub-folder, and when you do put it in Program Files don’t stick it inside [Publisher name]\[Developer name] - just stick a folder directly in there under the game’s name. Gamers want to be able to find their game files easily, not have to Google for everyone involved in its creation just so they can work out what folder it’s in.

This is doubly true of savegames. We need to be able to back those suckers up in case of disaster or a Windows reinstall. Know where STALKER hides its savegames in Vista? C:\Users\all users\documents\stalker-shoc, that’s where. Here’s where games whose developers aren’t crazy stick their saves on my PC - C:\Users\Alec\Documents\My Games. In other words, the standard My Games folder inside (My) Documents, a two-click, standard process to reach. To find STALKER’s saves, I have to dig through five separate sub-folders, in something I’d never otherwise look at. Who are these mythical ‘All Users’? They’re not me, that’s who.

Even our beloved World of Goo fails at this. The game goes into Program Files\World of Goo. The savegame - and the savegame alone - goes into C:\ProgramData\2DBoy\WorldOfGoo. ProgramData? Worse, that’s actually a hidden folder by default. Gah!

3. Automatically set themselves to your desktop screen resolution

Don’t default to something horrid and archaic like 640×480. The vast majority of PC gamers use flatpanel monitors, and games running at anything other than their native resolution tend to look horrible. Save us the hassle of changing the setting ourselves, but most of all save the less tech-savvy from having to work out what a resolution even is in the first place, or just putting up with a blurry screen because they’ve no idea how to fix it. Clearly, still allow the resolution to be easily changed to whatever the gamer wants, however: the game needs to support every res the monitor does.

4. Support widescreen resolutions.

Widescreen isn’t the future - it’s the present. Just look at the consoles for proof of that, or at the top hits for ‘monitor’ on Amazon. And expecting us to edit an ini file or type in command lines doesn’t count as widescreen support.

5. Uninstall in seconds.

Don’t have it laboriously check every single damn file before it has the grace to remove ‘em - just wipe the folder, pull the main hooks out of the registry and be done with it. I uninstalled the FIFA 09 demo today, and it all but locked up my PC for ten minutes while it did its ridiculous, disc-churning thing. Then I uninstalled the King’s Bounty: The Legend demo, and it was gone in the blink of an eye. That’s the way to do it. When I want someone to leave my house, I just want them gone - I don’t want them hanging around on the doorstep making tedious chit-chat for half an hour. Tied into this is installing neatly in the first place to ensure removal is simple - the game should all end up in one place, not explode tiny bits of itself all over the hard drive.

6. Don’t require the CD/DVD in the drive to play.

Again, we’re talking about a PC, a device with hundreds of gigabytes of storage. A game needing to look at a plastic disc entirely external to the game install folder whenever it runs is openly ludicrous. I know it’s for copy protection’s sake (and even so is of debatable effectiveness in this day and age), but the annoyance to legit customers surely outweighs a few extra lost sales before the inevitable no CD crack turns up anyway. Requiring PC gamers to scrabble through a vast pile of discs just to play the game they’ve already installed is contrary to the nature of the platform, and lures people towards less than legal solutions that may ultimately push them further towards piracy. And you wouldn’t want that, would you publishers?

Microsoft is currently facing several lawsuits claiming that Xbox 360's DVD drive causes damage and scratches to inserted discs when moved. The company's position got weaker today as court documents revealed that it already knew about the problem well before the console's launch.

"When we first discovered the problem in September or October (2005), when we got a first report of disc movement, we knew this is what's causing the problem," Microsoft program manager Hiroo Umeno told the court. Xbox 360 was released a month or 2 later, in November 2008.

Microsoft's testing revealed that when the console is tilted, discs inside become "unchucked" and collide with the drive's pickup unit, causing damage and scratches.

Microsoft's engineers considered three solutions. The first solution was decreasing the drive's reading speed, but it was refused because it would increase game loading time. The second solution was also dismissed because it interfered with the drive's opening and closing mechanism. The third solution, installing small bumpers, was technically alright, but it was too expensive. It would have cost between $35 million and $75 million, and thus it was refused.

Instead, Microsoft opted to adding the following section the product's manual: "Remove discs before moving the console or tilting it between the horizontal and vertical positions." Another warning was also affixed to the Xbox 360's disc drive later.

Microsoft also initiated an Xbox 360 disc replacement program that sends out new discs to customers if their discs are damaged for any reason. The program only applies to Microsoft titles and costs $20 per disc.

An internal Microsoft email, quoted in court, revealed that Microsoft's employee considered those actions to be insufficient.

You’ve arrived in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop. You don’t really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat.

You pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favorite review site. It automatically deduces your location, and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple blocks away and plots directions there.

In order for this to be a possibility, your browser needs to know where you are.

To do this, future versions of Firefox plan on supporting the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and you to optionally grant access to, your location. We’re still working out the specifics, but we’re hoping that location will be provided by one or more user selectable service providers and methods, e.g. GPS-based, WiFi-based, manual entry, etc.You’ll be able to play with this in the upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1, as well as alpha releases of Fennec.

We realized, though, that some of our Firefox 3 users might also want to get a head start playing with gelocation Today.

Introducing Geode, an experimental add-on to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 ahead of the implementation of geolocation in a future product release. Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware experiences using Firefox 3 today, and users can tell us what they think of the experience it provides. It includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data.

The potential here is for more than just resturant lookups. For example, imagine an RSS reader that knows the difference between home and work and automatically changes it’s behavior appropriately. Or a news site whose local section is, in fact, actually local. Or Web site authentication that only allows you to login from certain physical locations, like your house.

What else will location make possible? Even if you can’t code, you can share your thoughts by commenting on this post or via the Concept Series, a forum for surfacing, sharing, and collaborating on new ideas and concepts.

How It Works & Privacy Implications

With Geode when a web site requests your location a notification bar will ask how much information you want to give that site: your exact location, your neighborhood, your city, or nothing at all.

We’re using Skyhook’s Loki technology to map the Wifi signals in your area to your location. Unlike normal GPS-based methods which can take upwards of 45 seconds for a lock, Geode works both inside and outside with an accuracy of between 10 to 20 meters, normally within a second.

Please note that in this early implementation, both location and IP information is sent to the current provider, Skyhook, everytime a website is granted access to your location. Skyhook’s privacy policy is that they do not store or use any personal identifying information, and they promise to only keep data in anonymized agregate. The ultimate plan for Firefox is that service providers and geolocation methods will be pluggable and user selectable — to provide users with as many choices and privacy options as possible.

As an experiment, Geode is also the beginning of a conversation about location-based privacy and integrating services that share personal data into Web browsers.

Try as you might to get away from Windows, you might think that you're stuck with using it because there's this one program that you have to use and you can't find anything on Linux or Mac OS that works for you. Well, you're in luck. CodeWeavers the company behind CrossOver Linux Pro and CrossOver Mac Pro is offering for today, October 28th, free downloads and registrations for these programs that will enable you to run many popular Windows programs, such as Quicken, Microsoft Office, and Photoshop CS2 on your favorite operating system.

This offer started as a pointed joke at George W. Bush's expense: the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge. In the Challenge, which CodeWeavers launched in July, the company said it would provide its software for free in the unlikely event that under Bush's administration any of the following things happened: Return the stock market to it's 2008 high; Reduce the average price of a gallon of milk to $3.50; Create at least one net job in the U.S. this calendar year; Return the median home price to its Jan. 1, 2008 level; Bring Osama Bin-Laden to justice; or, and this one that actually happened, bring the average gasoline prices in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) to $2.79 a gallon.

As Jeremy White, president and CEO of CodeWeavers, explains, "I was filling my tank at Big Steve's Gas Palace in St. Paul, I had just finished my morning corn dog and 64-ounce Dr. Pepper when I looked at the pump and noticed gas was at $2.79. I screamed 'Woohoo,' then I yelled 'Oh, crap!' as I realized every American can now have my software for free. Kind of upsets my fourth quarter revenue projections..."

White admits this is not how he foresaw the Challenge unfolding. "I launched the campaign to inspire President Bush to make the most of his final days in office. Who knew that our Challenge would have this kind of impact on the country?" White said. "On the other hand, who knew that the economy would implode, causing oil demand to drop into the abyss and gas prices to plummet as well. Clearly, investigating Bear Stearns, AIG and those guys is misplaced -- CodeWeavers is responsible for this mess. So it's free software for all!"

Somehow, I don't think it really worked quite that way, but hey, free software is free software. To get a copy of CrossOver Mac Pro, Crossover Linux Pro, CrossOver Mac Games or CrossOver Linux Games, visit the company's Web site and download the software. You will, eventually, get a deal code that fully enables the software and gets you six-months of support as well.

I say 'eventually,' because right now the site is swamped. White says though that the company will send the registration code to users by e-mail over the next few days.

What you're getting for this is a program that makes the open-source project Wine an implementation of the Windows API (application program interface) on top of the Unix/Linux operating system family easy to use. Wine has more than 15 years of development behind it. In addition, CrossOver supports ActiveX, a Microsoft COM (component object mode) that's used on such Web pages and DirectX, a Microsoft multimedia API that's usually used in games.

What Wine isn't however, is easy to implement on your own. That's where CrossOver comes in. CrossOver makes it simple to install both the Wine framework and Windows programs on both Linux and Mac OS X.

Once installed, you can run many popular Windows applications and games. This isn't just what CrossOver claims, I've used CrossOver Linux for years and it works extremely well. In my own case, I often use Windows applications running on Linux thanks to CrossOver to work on Word 2003 documents, Excel 2003 spreadsheets, Internet Explorer 6-specific Web pages, and fairly complicated Quicken 2006 financial statements.

I also use it to play WoW (World of Warcraft) and, my own favorite game, Guild Wars. I'm a fairly serious player vs. player Guild Wars player and I can assure you that if Guild Wars, a 3D MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) didn't work well on Linux, I'd be running it on Windows.

How much do I like CrossOver? I pay my own money for it. How was I to know that gas would drop below $3 a gallon!?

CrossOver doesn't run everything, and it does have some quirks. That said, it does run most of the important Windows applications and, hey, today, you get the full version for free so you can try it out for yourself. Go for it! You've nothing to lose, and you might just find yourself able to give up your nasty Windows habit for good.

Having made available for download version 2 of its Adobe Flash killer, Microsoft is already moving onward to the next iteration.

Silverlight 2 was released to web in mid-October 2008, and, for next year, Microsoft is cooking the third release of what it is defining as a cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device browser plug-in, designed to support interactive and Rich Internet Application experiences. In this regard, Silverlight 3 is planned for availability in 2009.

“Silverlight 3 will include major media enhancements (including H.264 video support), major graphics improvements (including 3D support and GPU hardware acceleration), as well as major application development improvements (including richer data-binding support and additional controls). Note these are just a small sampling of the improvements - we have plenty of additional cool features we are going to keep up our sleeves a little longer,” revealed Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Platform.

Essentially, behind the plug-in, the technology of Silverlight is in fact a subset of the .NET Framework. Microsoft itself is committed to developing using Silverlight. Guthrie offered a variety of examples in this regard, from MSN Toolbar to Windows Live Photos and Windows Live Video messages. At the same time, the forthcoming Office 14 Web Companion RIA applications, which will accompany the successor of the Office 2007 System, will also use the technology.

“We shipped Silverlight 2 last month. Over the last 4 weeks, the final release of Silverlight 2 has been downloaded and installed on more than 100 million consumer machines. It has also recently been published to corporate administrators via the Microsoft SMS and Microsoft Update programs to enable them to automatically deploy across enterprises. Over 1 in 4 computers on the Internet now have some version of Silverlight installed,” Guthrie added.

Experience the web, Apple style, with Safari: the fastest, easiest-to-use web browser in the world. With its simple, elegant interface, Safari gets out of your way and lets you enjoy the web faster than any browser. Safari is free for Mac + PC.

The speed of Safari combined with its intuitive user interface lets users spend more time surfing the web and less time waiting for pages to load. Other Safari features now available to Windows users include SnapBack, one-click access to an initial search query, resizable text fields, and private browsing to ensure that information about an individual’s browsing history isn’t stored.

What’s New in this Version - This update includes stability improvements and is recommended for all Safari users.

A fix for a problem that sometimes allowed form field information to be stored in the page cache, even if the autocomplete function was disabled, was especially noteworthy. Apple learned that this would disclose sensitive information to a local console user, and delivered the fix.

USB Safely Remove is a convenient and safe replacement for the standard "Safely Remove Hardware" tool. The program has many features designed for effortless working with hotplug devices (USB, SATA and FireWire).

In order to promote upcoming version 4.0 we kindly give you a chance to get a one-year license for the program for free. You may use all the features of the program and get upgrades for one year for free.

Safely remove in one click

The program is an original and convenient tool for safe removing a device. It also detects all connected devices and can be used to view their drive contents. Just move the mouse pointer over the tray icon of the program and you will see a multi-featured 'quick stop' menu with a list of devices

One mouse click on the device and it is safely removed!

Get rid of unnecessary devices!

Are you afraid of accidentally stopping the card reader built into your laptop or dongle? Annoyed by a SATA hard drive or ADSL modem in the device list? Now you can hide any device from the stop menu in one simple step.

Global keyboard shortcuts

Do you like to do everything using the keyboard? Now you can stop and view devices by using just ONE hotkey! No need to remember keyboard shortcuts for each device. If you are in any application, press the key combination (Win+S by default) and you will see the stop menu. Use the Up\Down arrow keys to select the device you need and either press 'Enter' to stop it or 'Ctrl+B' to view the contents of any storage device.

Correct and clear device names

With USB Safely Remove, you will easily find the device you need to stop because the program detects the actual names of devices - the names the manufacturer gave them. If you wish, you can assign your own custom name and image for a device or choose from one of the pre-installed images.

Compare the following and you will see what solution will allow you to safely remove a flash disk without wasting your time.

... standard Windows menu...

... convenient USB Safely Remove stop menu.

The device cannot be stopped right now. Why?

Ever encountered the situation when Windows does not allow you to remove a device? Now this problem is solved once and for all. USB Safely Remove will show you what programs are not allowing you to stop the device and you can stop or disable them in one step.